How To Write A Waking Up Scene That Works

One of the many rules of writing that no one ever listens to is to not start with your character waking up. The reason is because waking up is boring. The character has a normal morning before they face the problems that will plague them throughout the rest of the book. However, Kathryn Croft’s While You Were Sleeping turns those that tired trope on its head.

So we’ve established that waking up scenes are boring because nothing interesting happens. However, in this book, waking up is the start of something very interesting. The main character wakes up to a room and a bed that she doesn’t recognize.

She is also naked and lying next to her married neighbor who has been literally stabbed through the heart.

Well, that’s certainly not your typical wake up scene. There’s nothing ordinary or average about this day because she’s not in her house and there’s a dead man in bed with her.

The rest of the story hinges on what she did, or rather didn’t’ do, in the first few minutes of waking up. In this way, she manages to take the normally horrible trope of waking up into one of the most interesting parts of the book.

It sets the tone for the entire book, and here’s where most new authors make their mistakes. Their waking up scene doesn’t reveal tone, it reveals the setting.

Any scene that only shows only the setting is a boring scene, regardless of whether or not your character is waking up.

First chapters, need to set the mood. Waking up with a dead man next to you and trying to hide it in a scared, serious way tells you this book isn’t going to be a laugh a minute book.

However, a character who wakes up in a normal room on the start of what they think is a normal day, could be any genre of book, and that will confuse your readers enough to put the book down before it gets any ‘better’. After all, with a boring wake up scene, your readers think you’re book is only going to get worse.

If you’d like to see an example of waking up done right, then be sure to check out Kathryn Croft’s While You Were Sleeping.